The Death Of Circumstantial Evidence

Updated on July 5, 2011

The Death Of Circumstantial Evidence

Who would have thought or known that the advent of the television show, CSI, and its countless spin-offs and copycats, would have spell the death knell for the concept of Criminal Circumstantial Evidence. Once again, a travesty of justice – and, accordance to what used to be conventional wisdom in deciding evidence, predicated upon common sense, died today down in the Florida court room. There are those who are going to second guess the DA… opining on why the State of Florida went for Premeditation… instead of the lesser charge.

Let me get this: a child is missing for thirty long days, while said child’s mother is partying and getting vanity tattoos; while that same child’s mother made up out of whole cloth a phantom babysitter, intimating that said baby-sitter might have harmed the child; and the kicker being that the same mother had been perusing the Internet over some eighty times for chloroform, which might have been used to incapacitated the young child. I could go on and with what seems logically like mountains of Inculpatory evidence, yet that mother walked free. Have we heard this song before… you know with the white Bronco, Van Etter, Clark, Judge Ito, Brentwood, and the like…

I could understand why someone might hesitate to put someone to death on Circumstantial Evidence, but when said evidence is so overwhelming, then…. Years ago, I did an internship in the Bronx District Attorney’s office and I worked with some great men of honor – but it is also where I realized that justice had become about the numbers and unofficial quotas of clearing cases at the expense of depriving human beings from their families regardless of guilt or mitigating circumstances. Though my grades in Law school were better in Criminal and Constitutional Law, I could not practice in those areas… of advocating passionately for those who are guilty or seeking the incarceration or worse, of those innocent souls.

I too cannot sentence anyone to die on Circumstantial Evidence, but there is an alternative - jail. There was quite a split in America during the OJ trial, broken down on racial lines… I wonder when the dust is settled, how is this verdict going to break down? By the way, If on a snowy day, I see footsteps leading to my house, it is logical to think that, more than likely, that someone had walked to my home. I did not need any CSI team to assist me in reaching that conclusion, yet the line of bloodied bread crumbs were even more obvious about who harmed Caylee Anderson.

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